Abstract
The postcard is a tease. On the front, an elderly man dressed in a uniform peers through a keyhole into an unseen room (Figure 4.1). His crouching posture, complete with bent knees, outstretched arms, and pointed finger, connotes anticipation and excitement. Beneath the image, a text box with a musical phrase and the exclamation “My Word! How He is Kissing Her,” contextualizes the man’s voyeuristic pose, presenting him as a witness to an intimate moment between lovers. Below the image, a circular green seal, resembling the keyhole above, beckons the reader to peel it back and lift the flap of the card.
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Notes
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xi.
See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998).
Sara Ahmed, “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,” New Formations 63 (2007): 121–37, at 126.
Christopher B. Balme, “Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere,” in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, ed. Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010): 37–62, at 41.
James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. edn (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Naomi Schor, “‘Postales’: Representing Paris 1900,” in Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, ed. David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson (University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 2011), 1–23, at 13.
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York University Press, 2011), 12.
Mary C. Henderson, Broadway Ballyhoo: The American Theater Seen in Posters, Photographs, Magazines, Caricatures, and Programs (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1989), 11.
See also Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 339–40.
Henderson, Broadway Ballyhoo, 18–19, 20. For later statistics on billboards, see Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932), 149.
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Johnson maintains that billboards were unlike panoramas in that they did not offer a “comprehensive view from afar,” but rather offered something closer to a “medium shot” like a “film still projected onto a large screen.” Johnson, “The Ultimate,” 7.
On the star system, see Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 46–8;
Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11–34.
The scholarly literature on the Salome dance is extensive. See, for example, Amy Koritz, “Dancing the Orient for England: Maud Allan’s ‘The Vision of Salome,’” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 63–78;
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
Judith R. Walkowitz, “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918,” The American Historical Review 108.2 (2003): 337–76;
Mary Simonson, “‘The Call of Salome’: American Adaptations and Re-creations of the Female Body in the Early Twentieth Century,” Women & Music 11 (2007): 1–16.
Walker, qtd in George and Dorothy Miller, Picture Postcards in the United States, 1893–1918 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976), 16.
Tonie and Valmai Holt, Picture Postcards of the Golden Age: A Collector’s Guide (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971), 43; Miller, Picture Postcards, 22
Penny Farfan, “‘The Picture Postcard is a Sign of the Times’: Theatre Postcards and Modernism,” Theatre History Studies 32.1 (2012): 93–119, at 94.
Catherine H. Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.4 (2005): 365–94.
For an excellent discussion of how Americans interacted with cartes-devisite, see Nicole Berkin, “Cartomania and the Scriptive Album: Cartes-de-Visite as Objects of Social Practice,” in Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, ed. Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 49–62.
Veronica Kelly, “Beauty and the Market: Actress Postcards and their Senders in Turn-of-the-Century Australia,” New Theatre Quarterly 20.2 (2004): 99–116. Kyla Wazana Tompkins has similarly urged historians to pay closer attention to commercial trade cards. See Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York University Press, 2011), esp. 145–82.
Some impresarios also sold postcards of the theatres. See “New Amsterdam Theatre Souvenir Postal Cards for Sale at Window of Ladies’ Cloak-Room.” Playbills and Programs Collection, New York City, Box (1908) N–Z, Program for The Merry Widow, HRC. On the Merry Widow hat craze see Marlis Schweitzer, “‘Darn that Merry Widow Hat’: The On-and Offstage Life of a Theatrical Commodity,” Theatre Survey 50.2 (Nov. 2009): 189–221.
Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2003), 6.
Also Tara Rodman, “A Modernist Audience: The Kawakami Troupe, Matsuki Bunkio, and Boston Japanisme,” Theatre Journal 65.4 (December 2013): 489–505.
Yoshihara, Embracing, 77; also Josephine D. Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Rodman, “A Modernist,” 489–505.
See also Mona Domosh on the use of trade cards to make the world “legible” and Kristin Hoganson on white middle-class engagement with foreign cultures through commodities. Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006);
Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Burch gave the name “keyhole films” to characterize an early genre of film wherein a man stares at a woman undressing. Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Film (New York: Routledge, 2010), 872.
David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 175.
Wayne E. Fuller, Morality and Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 103.
Dorothy Ganfield Fowler, Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 101.
Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 124.
Trachtenberg, The Incorporation, 124–8; Nicholson Baker, Margaret Brentano, and Joseph Pulitzer, The World On Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911) (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005).
George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 141, 184, 186.
Douglas, The Golden Age, 185–6. See also Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. 65–93.
Norman Hapgood, The Stage in America, 1897–1900 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1901), 29–30.
Walter Prichard Eaton, “Footlight Fiction: The Wonders Performed By Press Agents,” American Magazine (Dec. 1907), 164; Vincent Landro, “Faking It: The Press Agent and Celebrity Illusion in Early Twentieth-Century Theatre,” Theatre History Studies 22 (2002): 95–113, at 100. “Noted Writer! Idah McGlone Gibson Represents Star of ‘East Lynne,’” Grand Rapids Evening Post, 12–27-1902, v. 237, p. 21, RLC, NYPLPA.
On the importance of department stores to newspapers see Douglas, The Golden Age, 83; David R. Spencer, The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 84–5.
Thomas Szendrey, “ Hungarian-American Theater,” in Ethnic Theatre in the United States, ed. M. Seller (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 192–5.
The Hungarian-American community may have been distressed when comparing their failed venture to the flourishing German-American theatre community, most visible at the Union Square Theatre and Irving Place Theater. Sabine Haenni, “A Community of Consumers: Legitimate Hybridity, German American Theatre, and the American Public,” Theatre Research International 28.3 (2003): 267–88.
Ryan Walker, “Powerful Drama of Mental Suggestion,” The Arena 40.228 (Dec. 1908): 536.
Steven Bela Vardy, “Image and Self-Image Among Hungarian Americans Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” East European Quarterly 35.3 (Sept. 2001), 309–42, at 309.
István Várkonyi, Ferenc Molnar and the Austro-Hungarian ‘Fin de Siècle’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 31.
Hagedorn qtd in Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 2.
Savage later arranged for the O’Brien novelization to be published as a novel with the J.S. Ogilvie Publishing Company, complete with introductory comments by famed advice columnist Beatrice Fairfax and the spiritualist poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Joseph O’Brien, The Devil: A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience (New York: J.S. Ogilvie, 1908).
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Schweitzer, M. (2015). “My Word! How He is Kissing Her”: The Material Culture of Theatrical Promotion. In: Transatlantic Broadway. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437358_5
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